Extract of Thoughts on SQIFF and Arika

SQIFF's arrival in Glasgow offered an opportunity to see a great many queer films in a short period of time, sketching out the boundaries of where queer cinema has been and where it is heading. The range of choices, from serious 1960s' attempts to articulate queerness to contemporary witty chronicles of dating anxiety, SQIFF is an inclusive and intelligent introduction to a difficult and contested area.

The presence of 'The Queer' in Glasgow has become increasingly visible, and this is partially thanks to the work of Arika, an Edinburgh based organisation who, for the past three or four years, have curated a series of events, both in Glasgow and beyond, that have celebrated queer theory and art. 

Arika's Episodes at Tramway have shown art from the New York Ballroom scene, staged lectures from academics and connected unlikely allies - Miss Prissy, the queen of crump and M Lamar, philosopher Fred Moten. It's this variety that ensured that Queerness was not simply presented as a novelty, but as a dynamic and diverse entity. Difficult to define, appropriately, but also fertile and emancipatory: the chat between Prissy and Ballroom artists revealed an intriguing shared enthusiasm for ballet, while Lamar's musical magic grappled with the problems of making beauty from ugly historical fact.

Arika's approach seems to be based in a series of conversations: some happen in America, others are not public facing (such as their 2014 'community work with the Sex Workers Open University'). These conversations are then placed in a public space, and audiences get to join in.

The proliferation of queer festivals in Scotland, and the identification of certain work as 'queer' (not always accurately), suggests that Arika's work has laid a foundation for a discussion about the meaning of the word and its importance for art and society. Typically, though, Arika have kept moving. Their last Episode took on the notion of care, moving away from the Ballroom and Black American emphasis of Episode 6.

Arika's work beyond Scotland feeds into their Glasgow Episodes, and each event becomes a link in a longer chain of conversations, arguments and creative practices. Without them - and this being an example of how allowing Arika to 'fail' (certain lectures are boring, some of the artists can indulge themselves on the audience's patience) can build towards a wider, more inclusive and evolving network of ideas and experimental festivals.


April 2014 - Masters Ballstar Weekend in New York with the ballroom community
Sept 2014 - Episode 6: Make A Way Out Of No Way
February - non-public community work in Glasgow with the Sex Workers Open University, the Unity Centre and West Glasgow Against Poverty
April 2015 - Episode 7: We Can’t Live Without Our Lives
May 2015 - No Total Weekend, New York

TLRS Morning Show

Cyber)feminist, non-essentialist transgender and queer daily radio shows using the formula of morning radio as an arch way of thinking about the scripted behaviour and controlled empathy of systematic care.

Introduction to Arika and Care (now with added alienation)

Ueinzz ! Ueinzz!

More on Arika, and the logic of Hegemony

I am still ambiguous about this particular reading of hegemony - that the powers-that-be are in control not only of the obvious stuff (like banks and governments), but the very ideas that are used to discuss politics. For example, in my discussion of 'community', I put forward the idea that 'community' is a manufactured idea, a commodification of the more simple fact of 'being together': this doesn't quite tale account of how groups have shared interests, which makes them more than just a bunch of random people. Like a church community probably has an interest in God and Jesus.

This analysis suggests that the debate about politics is limited to the terms as defined by the powers-that-be: it's possible that a good example of this is the way that the 'Big Three' British parties seem to share a belief in the necessity of 'austerity measures'. It's not acceptable to reject austerity within their discussions, just a matter of how much and who gets targeted. 

Yet the description of hegemony is susceptible to being accused of conspiracy style thinking. It postulated a vision of the world in which the world itself is an illusion (rather than Gnostic heresies or some versions of Buddhism and Hinduism). 

What the Poethical reading seem to offer is an alternative to the accepted terms of debate - and a mocking parody of rationality itself. I mean, tarot cards are a form of bullshit (although I like the use of symbolism) and astrology is totes amaze bullshit. 

TLRS @ Arika

Peter Pal Pelbart @ Arika Episode 7

3 acts outside normal parameters, sloppy design

Glitch/Lamar/Arika/Reasons

Arika Episode 7

How is it that contemporary life leaves us feeling ill and exhausted, uncared for - as if living by a thread? How might we care for each other differently? Can we think of care as a form of survival and resistance? Does thinking about such a socialised form of care require us to expand, challenge or refute the policed norms of ability and sanity, personhood and the body so violently imposed on us all?
We Can’t Live Without Our Lives is a 5-day exploration of these desires and struggles and practices that embody them, through theatre, film, discussion, workshops, collective investigations and being together.

Some highlights include Ueinzz Theatre Company, a radical Brazilian schizo-scenic theatre company of so-called psychotic patients, carers, philosophers - rehearsing a theatre capable of reversing the power over life into the potential of life. Eighteen members are coming to Glasgow to share their practice via performances, rehearsals and conversations.

(Cyber)feminist, non-essentialist transgender and queer daily radio shows and performances with Laurence Rassel and Terre Thaemlitz, using wacky sound effects, adopted characters, special guests and formulaic speech patterns as an arch way of thinking about the scripted behavior and controlled empathy of systematic care.

Two of our favourite thinkers on the body, the law, the state, gender, race, violence, care and empathy, Hortense J. Spillers and Denise Ferreira da Silva will explore how we might give humanness a different future.

Park McArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos will host a space in which they imagine bodies not as an end in themselves, but as a medium through which we can become one another’s means.

A double bill of films concerned with anti-patriarchal, anti-colonialist, anti-psychiatric, animist ideas of care and the self: Assemblages and Every Little Thing.

Hulk and the Vision get Real (Miss Prissy)

Hulk and The Vision Get Real (Ballroom style)

Iron Man and Spider-Man are thinking about Arika

Is Theatre Political?

into and out of the body: The Vile Arts Radio Hour

Sometimes, it is as if I had a plan: this episode of the Vile Arts Radio Hour - with brief guest appearances from DJ Hush and dramaturg Elliot Roberts - features two interviews: one with Josh Payne, prepping for Out of the Body with Cryptic and another with Barry Esson, getting ready to drop Arika's own episode. 

Between my desperate plugs for my own Uncle Vanya: In Dub and thoughts on why ballet is better than ballroom, both Payne and Esson are articulate and intriguing - and the body, as the place where art happens, comes up frequently. But while Payne is trying to create an experience that gets away from earthly feelings - it sounds like some techno-magic will be happening in the CCA, Esson's selection for Arika is getting jiggy with it. 

Consequently, the soundtrack is a mash of electronica (courtesy of Payne), operatic subversion (M Lamar) and r'n'b (from the first lady of crump, Miss Prissy).

And the theme: essentialism, abstraction and the like. As usual...

http://subcity.org/shows/thevileartsradiohour/6a74b/?play

M. Lamar and Brandon Masterman (2)

M. Lamar and Brandon Masterman

Arika: Make a Way Out of No Way

Arika: Episode 3, Copying without Copying 2012

The final part of Arika's triptych of programmes presents a weekend of four free events dealing with originality and identity

FEATURE BY GARETH K VILE.

PUBLISHED IN THE SKINNY 29 FEBRUARY 2012


Arika's love affair with hardcore Marxist dialectic has always been tempered by a fascination with post-modernity, especially in its most nihilistic and deconstructive versions. Marxists tend to claim that post-modernity's preoccupation with excluded narratives like feminism, anti-colonialism or anti-globalism can be threaded together around a socialist core, and much of the debate in Episode 1 centred around this possibility.

For Episode 3, Arika are going straight for a prominent post-modern concern: what is originality, and can it exist in an age when even individual identity is being questioned? Copying without Copying is Arika's most theatrical Episode so far – it includes performances of Eichmann's trial and Chto Delat?'s musical The Russian Woods – and throws down in the cat fight between artistic ownership and the collective creativity of communities. Marxism and deconstruction may share a passion for the savage critique of normative culture, but their intentions are radically different: Marxists want a better world, while deconstruction is happy to break up the existing one.

Luther Blisset – the pseudonym used by various anarchists, after a charming British football hero – articulates the heart of this Episode in his Radical Subjectivity. Arika's programme notes echo Blisset's belief that nothing can be told without the teller including their own history or value system – but where Arika use this to problematise the way that media is experienced, Blisset was encouraging artists to embrace it, even as he critiqued the false objectivity of the curator or writer. The sharp irony is that Luther Blisset could be anyone: meanwhile, each performance at Episode 3 has a clearly defined author.

Compared to the usual festival rush, Episode 3 is sparse: four events over a weekend, climaxing in two and a half hours of a "spectacular musical show which discusses the representation of a nation state, its characters and history." Chto Delat? acknowledge that it seems absurd to struggle against the violence of our times through art, yet their intellectual engagement does not prevent them from co-opting popular forms: mythology, musicals, the idea of a nation's soul are all reconstructed towards a serious end.

Starting the weekend is a performed installation based on the transcripts of the 1961 trial of SS Lieutenant Adolf Eichmann: the difficult content – Eichmann's trial threw up questions about state sovereignity, international law and personal responsibility – is matched by an appropriately challenging format, a fusion that Arika actively encourages. Throughout the three episodes, the festival has analysed militarism, the agenda behind advertising, the problems of art in a world bedevilled by callous politics and the suspicion that individual identity is being manipulated by consumerism. The discourse moves well beyond the events, and has inspired a series of online and radio discussions.

For this last episode, Arika has gone free: there is no door tax, only a request for emotional and intellectual engagement. The transition from experimental music to experimental festival has happened, and even Luther Blisset's radical attack on the intrinsic bias of the curator or writer is slightly satisfied.

Arika Present (Episodes 4 and 5)

Arika Present

Episode 4: Freedom is a Constant Struggle (Tramway 18 - 21 April)
Episode 5: Hidden in Plain Sight (Tramway 23 – 26 May & Stereo club night 24 May)

Arika’s ‘Expanded Festival’ of international film, live art, music and discussion premieres across Glasgow from the creators of INSTAL and Kill Your Timid Notion.


Episodes 4 & 5 are a continuation of 2012’s series A Film is a Statement, A Special Form of Darkness and Copying Without Copying. These new Episodes also build on Arika’s work at the Whitney Biennial in New York. Arika were the first ever UK contributors to the biennial and presented its first ever survey of sound.


Arika, the organisation behind two of the UK’s most prestigious experimental music and film events, INSTAL and Kill Your Timid Notion, return in 2013 with a second ‘expanded festival’. Taking place over two weekend-long Episodes spread across nine weeks, Arika will be bringing some of the world’s most renowned jazz musicians, preeminent poets and writers of African-American literary culture and interrogative performance artists into a creatively laidback dialogue with audiences, artists, activists, jazz lovers and the just plain curious.


“Arika are at the forefront of experientially rich, aesthetically demanding, and philosophically provoking curatorial practice. They appear to be an equal collaborator, challenging both their audiences and participating artists to bring their most potent work into view. They are doing the finest and most original curatorial work around...” Jay Sanders Co-Curator, 2012 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC



EPISODE 5: Hidden in Plain Sight


Like Episode 4, Episode 5 will be an exploration of some of the aesthetic practices that have been produced in fugitive spaces of freedom. Where Episode 4 explored the performance of freedom and blackness, this episode investigates the languages, gestures or habits by which different performances of gender or sexuality are socially enacted and performed. Whether that’s: voguing and the House|Ballroom scene, (trans-temporal) drag, lip syncing, public feelings, queer film, trauma, feeling bad, deep / queer house music and clubbing, low theory...


With: Vjuan Allure, Antonia Baehr, Cecilia Bengolea, Boychild, Pauline Boudry, François Chaignaud, Ann Cvetkovich, DJ Sprinkles, Marlene Freitas, Jack Halberstam, Trajal Harrell, Emma Hedditch, Renate Lorenz, Fred Moten, Jimmy Robert, Terre Thaemlitz, Vogue’ology.




About Arika


Arika were formed in 2001 and have brought audiences in Scotland and the UK festivals of experimental and underground music, sound, film, art and ideas including the INSTAL and Kill Your Timid Notion festivals as well as tours like Resonant Spaces and Shadowed Spaces.


“New Black Music is this: Find the self, then kill it.” Amiri Baraka.




The work of two of the most important and exciting African American poets and writers, Amiri Baraka and Fred Moten, frames the festival. Amiri was the founder of the Black Arts Movement; he is America’s great radicalised poet, transcribing the tragic as political despair - radicalism set to work. To close the first half of our extended festival, on Sunday, Amiri will enter into a . Grimes was central in defining the bass sound of free jazz on monumental recordings and performances with Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp and Cecil Taylo.


Other highlights across the weekend include:


Wadada Leo Smith: Trumpeter, multi-instrumentalist, composer, improviser and educator, Wadada is one of the great figures in jazz, and the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) a musician-led institution that seeks the creative and representational control of its music and education. His music, grounded in a historical poetics, suggests what can be done as racism, poverty and justice intersect; bearing witness to a struggle built upon patience, collective action, a thousand acts: “None of these pieces are meant simply to be listened to.”



John Tilbury: Tilbury is the great avant-garde pianist of our time. We continue to be deeply affected by his thinking on music, politics and ideology: “There is no such thing as an artistic conscience which is not governed by world outlook…the content of a piece of music is not something mysterious, unattainable or elusive. On the contrary, creative listening, that is, listening to music that involves the mind as well as the ears and heart, can attain a measure of understanding of what a composer is saying about the world.”


Teresa Maria Diaz Nerio presents Ni ‘mamita’ Ni ‘mulatita’. A performed film lecture; maybe a little melodramatic, maybe danced, maybe not, but either way exploring how the ‘Rumberas’ of Caribbean cinema of the 40’s and 50’s subverted demeaning images of themselves (e.g.: the prevalance of brown/ blackface, the mammy and the mulata stereotype) through dance, sound and a sociality that insisted on blackness as being a cultural performance, not simply due to skin colour.


Daniel Carter & William Parker: Is the music of exceptional jazz saxophonist Daniel Carter an improvisation of his, free associationist, non-impositional anarchism? When William Parker, the great jazz bassist of our time, says: "it is the role of the artist to incite political, social, and spiritual revolution, to awaken us from our sleep and never let us forget our obligations as human beings…" what’s he getting at? And: what might their collaboration tell us about our own performances of responsibility and liberty, whether individual, social or musical?


M. NourbeSe Philip presents Zong! "A brash, unsettling book, Zong! wants to chant or shout history down, shut history up… Fretful, possessed, obsessed, upset, curse and homeopathy, both, it visits a breathtaking run of glossolalic scat upon historical trauma." Nathaniel Mackay. Can a collective performance of NourbeSe’s poem of black life as it exceeds containment enact alternative forms of selfhood that emerge in and out of African diasporic experience? And how do we read NourbeSe’s anti-narrative poetic lament in Glasgow today, given the city’s role in the history of slavery?


Both Episodes are designed to be informed but informal. Whilst each has a distinct, yet related, set of concerns at its core, the artists and events involved constantly query not only the intersections of, and the tensions between, music, poetry, performance and theory but also those between gender, sexuality and race. Our Episodes are intended as a kind of convivial, exploratory cross between a salon, festival and live magazine; maybe a kind of concentrated space in which ideas about art and its social use can be investigated through intense performances and thought-provoking discussions with leading international artists and thinkers, and hopefully with the people in Glasgow who might have the most to say in return.